Social media
Creating Social Media Posts for Film, TV and Theatre
A practical guide for art departments and indie filmmakers: fictional handles, clearance, screen inserts vs. replacements, resolution and continuity.
By The Mocknex team · Published · Updated · 8 min read
Characters live on their phones, so productions of every size need on-screen posts, chats and notifications. A good graphic sells the moment; a careless one can create legal headaches or pull the audience out of the scene. This guide is a practical starting point for art departments, indie filmmakers, theatre designers and students. It isn’t legal advice — for commercial productions, run your graphics past your clearance process.
Clearance basics
The safest graphics avoid anything that points at a real person, company or account:
- ✓Invent account names and handles, then search them to make sure they aren’t real, active accounts.
- ✓Avoid real people’s names, faces and photos unless you have written permission.
- ✓Don’t show real company logos. Our generators use original layouts and generic icons for this reason.
- ✓Use fictional phone numbers, email domains and URLs (example.com is reserved for this).
- ✓Keep a record of where every image in the graphic came from and its licence.
Some productions go further and invent an entire fictional social network with its own name and colours. That’s the most bulletproof option, at the cost of instant recognition. Platform-inspired layouts like ours sit in between: viewers recognise the kind of app without any official branding.
Fictional names, handles and numbers
| Element | Safe approach |
|---|---|
| Phone numbers | North America: 555-0100 to 555-0199 are reserved for fiction |
| Web addresses | example.com, example.org, or an invented domain you’ve checked |
| Handles | Search every handle on the platform before you shoot |
| News outlets | Invented outlet names (e.g. “Harbor City News”) |
| Brands | Invented brands; never real logos |
Insert, screen replacement or practical?
- Graphic insert: cut to a full-frame image of the screen. The easiest and most legible option — export at 3× and you have a crisp 1179 × 2556 image to animate.
- Screen replacement: shoot the actor holding a phone with a blank or tracking-marker screen and composite the graphic in post. Export the screen without a phone frame and with the status bar on.
- Practical: load the image onto a real phone and shoot it in camera. Turn on the phone frame off, export at the phone’s native resolution, and open the image full-screen. Disable auto-brightness to avoid flicker.
Resolution and framing
For inserts in 4K timelines, export at 3× and scale up slightly in your editor, or export the Presentation preset and crop. Large text is your friend: raise Text size in the chat tools so key lines stay legible after compression. Keep the status bar time consistent with the scene’s time of day.
Continuity
Save a project file for every graphic (Project → Save project). When the script changes on the day, you can reopen it, edit one line and re-export with identical styling. Keep battery level, wallpaper and time consistent across a sequence — audiences notice when the battery jumps from 12% to 80% between shots.